Spanish Region Goes Entirely Open Source

greengrass writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the Spanish region of Extremadura has decided to go completely open source with their day-to-day operations. While the region has long been a supporter of open source software, within a year it will be a requirement that all officials use the ODF and PDF formats for all documents. From the article: "Extremadura, Spain's poorest region, made headlines following a 2002 decision to migrate about 70,000 desktops and 400 servers in its schools to a locally tailored version of Debian called gnuLinEx. The government has estimated that the total cost of this project was about 190,000 euros (£130,000), 18 million euros lower than if the schools had purchased Microsoft software. "

Comments

190,000Euro divided by 70,400 computers.....

[Corey Hart]

Interesting that the math says that each computer cost less than 3Euros (or about $3) to do. Since I imagine it would take about 10minutes for the average superman to set up a computer via some great imaging technique, that means the IT staff was working at about $18/hour.